


tumble, fall, pop

by tomaetotomahtoe



Series: of wands and stun darts (and all the things in between) [1]
Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, M/M, My First Fanfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:34:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24769351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomaetotomahtoe/pseuds/tomaetotomahtoe
Summary: Harry meets Alex. Primary School Edition.-----“Grown-ups,” the boy waves it off flippantly. “They don’t believe in much. My uncle didn’t believe I could pick my way through the lock.” At this point he smirks, “with this,” he holds up a hairpin triumphantly.Harry feels his eyes go wide “Are you surethat’snot magic?” He laughs breathlessly at this odd boy, who look at him and not away like everyone else at school who sees Harry being chased by Dudley’s gang and leaps out of their path. This boy who doesn’t wrinkle his nose at Harry’s oversized, worn sweaters. Who unlock doors with hairpins and see strange things happening around Harry (possibly the strangest thing that has happened yet) andgrins.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Alex Rider
Series: of wands and stun darts (and all the things in between) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1798747
Comments: 13
Kudos: 145





	tumble, fall, pop

It begins, as most stories often do, with running.

Or in this case, running away.

Harry swerves to the right, narrowly dodging the rock thrown at his shoulder, a roundish thing about the size of his palm, and it lands next to Mimzy the school cat, startling it unto yowling and puffing up like a pillow. Not that Harry has time to pay any mind to it, his legs already straining to pump as much distance as possible between him and the gang of boys hot on his heels.

He never really had to be chased before. Stones collected from the schoolyard are a recent upgrade in Dudley’s arsenal, and they hurt much more than the thin metal strips that Piers usually delights in shooting at him across their desks with his stapler.

Harry thinks he prefers the latter.

Luck comes in the from of a couple of students walking in front of him. They must have been coming in from the field, carrying in between them a box of tennis rackets that Harry has no trouble ducking under. In his haste he lifts his head too early and ends up knocking the box out of their hands, toppling it over.

Feeling slightly guilty yet grateful for the distraction, he mumbles a “sorry” and pushes faster, focusing on the building in front and ignoring the crashes and angry yells behind him as rackets were spilled and the two groups collide into each other.

Harry reaches the school building and darts around the corner, whipping his head around and frantically searching out hiding spots that will last him the rest of recess period. He knows that there is no way he can keep up his pace for long, winded as he was – they have chased him up and down the school grounds _twice_ already. The narrow lane between the rusty red bricks of the wall and the wired green fence is kept mostly sparse, save for the big green dumpster sitting on the left, next to a door that must lead into the school kitchens, judging from musty smell of rotting food coming from the bin.

‘This is not the brightest idea I’ve had today’, thinks Harry desperately as he then runs up to the bin, scrambling up the grimy dumpster the best he could with all four limbs of his eight year old body, sweaty and thin knobby fingers pushing hard on the lid to force it open a crack. The smell of putrid, decomposing bananas wafts up his nostrils, and he hesitates, perhaps takes a second to regret his life choices, but the yells and thudding sounds of shoes on dirt comes closer, and Harry renews his efforts to push the big, heavy lid with all his might.

He almost succeeds in opening the lid big enough to squeeze himself in, when he hears a scurrying sound coming from the inside, a rustling of plastic.

Gulping, he peeks into the bin to see three _**gigantic** fat rats _glaring up at him from bulging bags of leftovers, shiny black plastic torn and scavenged.

Their red eyes glow in the dark like laser beams, and they tittered at him almost menacingly. Harry startles, jerking back and losing his grip on the bin, his legs slipping off the ridges at the sides. He closes his eyes with a squeak and curls in on himself as he falls backwards, expecting to hit the dirt–

–and lands on his back on smooth white tiles, suddenly squinting at the bright glint of the sun above him, seeming somehow closer than before. Also, the ground is _really_ hot, Harry thinks as he jolts himself into a sitting position and brings his hands close to his chest, rubbing at his reddened palms.

Panting heavily still, he remembers Dudley’s gang with a start and snaps his head around expecting to see his cousin thundering up to him, behind him Malcolm arm’s full of rocks, Piers readying himself for another throw- where is he?

Instead of seeing brick walls and bullies, Harry stares in confusion at uniformed rows of sweet corn and pumpkin, pots of flowers and herbs in assorted colours, and gloves hanging out in the sun to dry on a piece of string.

Somehow, he has landed on his school’s rooftop garden.

Harry pushes himself on to his feet, and limps - one of the stones hit his foot earlier- to one of the aloe vera plants, poking it to see if it was real. He touches the smooth and thick flesh of the greyish-green leaves with his finger. ‘Huh’ he thinks dazedly, ‘I must have hit my head harder than I thought’. The rooftops are only accessible to the gardening club, for students who want to learn about urban farming. Harry himself has only been there once, and his relatives didn’t let him join extracurriculars anyhow. To have a dream of such detail–

“How did you get here?” A voice comes up from his right, causing him to jerk, his finger catching itself on one of the sharp bits and pricking on the flesh. Harry yelps, seeing his finger well up with blood, and wipes it hurriedly down the side of his pants, looking at the voice.

A boy stares at him from a bench in the corner, a small little alcove shaded by climbing plants and flowery vines. His head is tilted slightly to the side, with short blond hair slightly ruffled at one side, brown eyes squinting in bewilderment. He has a book beside him on the ground, face down and pages slightly squished, as if dropped and left forgotten.

He's kind of pretty.

Harry sorts of stares at him for a while, before he remembered his question. “I-I don’t” he flushes, looking around again “I don’t know. I was um, running from. And then I fell.” Speaking of which…

He rushes to the ledge, looking down for the lane near the wire fences, and spots the same dumpster in the corner, now a few storeys down. Dudley and his gang of friends stood there, five tiny figures, and he sees them scratching their heads in puzzlement, trying to retrace Harry’s steps. One of them points at the dumpster.

“I was there, and now I’m… up here” he breathes in shock, looking at them laughing and kicking the dumpster, daring each other to open it. “I don’t know _how_ ”.

Strange things often happen to Harry, and it wasn’t the first time he has ended up in somewhere he wasn’t before. Sometimes, he finds himself two more steps down the stairs than he was before, running from Dudley and barely dodging his right hooks. Sometimes while cooking, the oil from the pan makes a particularly loud splatter and he finds himself suddenly across of the room, still holding the spatula and staring at the eggs turning brown at the edges.

Once, Harry really needed to pee, and he wished really hard not to soil his bed. Next thing he knew, he landed on top of the toilet seat, despite his cupboard door being locked from the outside.

Needless to say, the Dursleys were not happy to come home from their regular Sunday outings - church in the mornings, then picnic at the park, a dinner party with friends - to find Harry sitting in the living room, having no way to go back in. He got a week in the cupboard for that.

Still, it was never got as far as falling from the ground to the rooftop of his school. Harry finds himself pointing out the dumpster to the boy, who caught up to where he was “I was- I was going to-” here he flushes again in embarrassment, thinking about his lousy hiding spot. “Never mind, but um. I slipped and- maybe the wind caught me mid-way?” His voice ends with a squeak.

Downstairs, the boys shove at each other and laughs, kicking at the bin one more time and hurling insults at it before they jauntily went on their way. They probably think staying in that smelly bin is just as well of a punishment. Harry's rather inclined to agree.

“If the wind caught you, I would’ve seen it.” Harry turns his head again, and looks at the boy who is shaking his head furiously. “ But there was a pop, and you fell from nowhere.” His hand clasps wildly in front of him, brown eyes alight and face flushed pink with excitement, grinning from ear to ear. “It was like- like magic!”

“Magic,” Harry breathes, a little bit of thrill curling in his gut, smile catching simply from seeing the blonde's excitement. But it dies down quickly when he remembers that magic doesn’t exist, according to Aunt Petunia. He tells the boy so.

“Grown-ups,” the boy waves it off flippantly. “They don’t believe in much. My uncle didn’t believe I could pick my way through the lock.” At this point he smirks, “with this,” he holds up a hairpin triumphantly. 

Harry feels his eyes go wide “Are you sure _that’s_ not magic?” He laughs breathlessly at this odd boy, who look at him and not away like everyone else at school who sees Harry being chased by Dudley’s gang and leaps out of their path. This boy who doesn’t wrinkle his nose at Harry’s oversized, worn sweaters. Who unlock doors with hairpins and see strange things happening around Harry (possibly the _strangest_ thing that has happened yet) and _grins_.

“It’s not magic really,” the boy shrugs, “you really just need to know how to move it around. I’ve been practicing to get into my uncle’s office before he’s back on his business trip. If I manage to do it I get a reward.”

“But that’s brilliant!” squeaks Harry in astonishment, because it is. Uncle Vernon would probably have his head if he even _thinks_ about breaking in his office. “Your uncle must be really cool. Is that how you got in here?”

The other boy nods sheepishly, “this is my second time here, actually. I don’t think the gardening club comes up during recess, and it really is quite peaceful.” He takes a deep breath, looking out at the rest of the school below them, at children playing cricket and eating sandwiches under the trees.”I transferred here two weeks ago, you see. My uncle and I, well- we move around a lot. It’s a bit tiring to make friends that way.” He frowns down at Dudley’s gang picking on another poor unfortunate soul “they _are_ really kind of vicious, aren’t they?”

“Vicious?” Harry asks, not really knowing what that means.

“Like cruel, or really mean. But they do it on purpose.” Harry wondered how people can be mean if not on purpose. He asks the boy, who replies “Well, if you had a bad dream, and you wake up grumpy, sometimes you can’t help but be mean too, right?” Harry supposes so. He never really had bad dreams though. Most of them are of flying motorcycles. And broomsticks.

“But never mind that!” The boy perks up. “Is that the first time you’ve done it? Falling from down there to up here? You seem surprised but not very, so I thought maybe you’ve done it before. Do you think you can jump to Pluto from here? Scientists are working on teleportation you know, but I don’t think they’re quite ready to try teleporting people, so. Are there other magic things you could do? I’ve read up on some card tricks, but they don’t really seem to be so magical…” the boy continues to babble as he grabs Harry’s arm and pulls him along towards the bench, his brown eyes open and warm, his face flushed with eagerness.

Harry, shyly awed by his acceptance, tries to answer his questions, carefully sharing bits and bobs of the strange things that happened around him since he was small. When he turned his hair blue. The oil splatters. Dudley’s ugly sweater that shrunk to the size of a hand glove when Aunt Petunia tried to shove it over his head. His companion gasps at some of his stories, sometimes chortles at the funny ones, but he never not believes any of them.

The boy shares some in return, stories of treasure hunts his uncle had left for him all over the house filled with riddles in code that he needed to solve, learning how to always win at a card game called poker by storing extra cards in his sleeve, games to pickpocket receipts from random people when they go on a grocery run – the stories get more and more outrageous, and Harry is almost certain the Dursleys would hate everything about this boy’s uncle, even though he is also a normal businessman like how Uncle Vernon sells drills at Grunnings.

They end up talking until the bell rings.

It is only when the boy opens the door, right hand up to give a friendly wave, that Harry abruptly realises he never asked for his name.

“I’m Harry!” He blurts out at the boy, surprising himself. He has never wanted to introduce himself so urgently, feeling as if he will never find someone _like this_ ever again. “Harry Potter. And you are?”

The boy looks startled, and laughs. Harry can see the his muddy brown eyes crinkling under stands of fair golden hair, his wide open smile causing a small indent on his right cheek. “Hi Harry. I’m Alex. Alex Rider” he greets warmly. “Lets be friends.”

 _Friends_. Harry floats back down later in a daze, wandering into his class and sliding into his seat on autopilot. He looks down at his desk, barely noticing his mathematics book marked in pencil with penises and rude words, not quite hearing a sneered “Potty Potter” thrown at him a few desks over, and thinks about Alex, the boy with fair hair and brown eyes who passed him a hairpin and briefly explained the mechanics of picking open his cupboard door. He can't quite keep the grin off his face.

Having a friend sounds nice.

**Author's Note:**

> uncle ian is a crazy spy uncle but alex only has the one.
> 
> they chill at the rooftop garden whenever harry manages to avoid dudley (which becomes most days, he gets better at running and hiding - and sometimes apparating. its kinda unreliable though so Harry doesn't do it very often). he also brings a garden snake that he found in the backyard, and alex wants to learn parseltongue in addition to french and russian because he's an overachiever.
> 
> alex starts to take two portion of snacks from the kitchen and brings it to school everyday. jack just thinks he's a growing boy.
> 
> he's two years older, so one year later alex graduates and he moves to chelsea. he and harry still exchange letters though.harry gets good at hiding letters that arrive in the mail, so the dursleys never raged about the first hogwarts letter, although hagrid still breaks down their door on his birthday, causing tea to overflow in privet drive at the monthly neighbour stakeouts.
> 
> -
> 
> thanks for reading my first fic! looking for feedback :)


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